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Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Backup Azure Virtual Machine By Using Azure Backup

It is about time ! Something to cheer off on this enhancement to protect Azure Virtual machine..Recently Microsoft has added a new enhancement to Azure Backup which allow us to backup virtual machine on Microsoft Azure without any impact to production workloads and without shutdown of VM. Depend on your virtual machine guest operating system, Azure backup perform

application level consistency for Windows OS

file system level consistency for Linux OS

Let have a quick walkthrough on this feature:

[ Pre-requisite]

Created a Backup vault on the same region as IaaS VM

+New | Data Services | Recovery Services | Backup Vault

[ Our test scenario]

1 Windows Server 2008 R2 VM

1 Ubuntu VM

1 Windows Server 2012 R2 VM

[Configuration]

To configure, you must perform 3 steps:

Run discovery

Register VM

Protect VM

Step 1: Go to Vault | Click Registered Items | Click Discovery

Step 2:- Register VM

Make sure virtual machine is up and running and not Deallocated state in order to successful on registration.

Click on Register | Select VM that you would like to protect

Once VM status is “Registered”, proceed to step 3

Step 3:- Backup VM

To configure backup policy, click PROTECT

Click PROTECT, select VM to backup and select your backup policy

You can set backup frequency to

Daily

Weekly

Frequency :- Time every 30 minute

Retention range- by default 30 days

It’s agentless backup and able to protect multiple virtual machine.

Once it is protected, you cannot add the same VM on another backup policy and add an additional backup time into same policy.

[ Perform on demand backup]

Click on PROTECTED ITEMS TAB, click “Backup Now”

In our test scenario, the on-demand backup work as when VM is running or DEALLOCATED state.

[ To Remove/ Modify Backup Policy ]

Click on POLICIES tab, select the policy that you would like to remove and press DELETE.

You can select the policy and modify the protection configuration.

One set back thatwe found iscannot remove each individual VM without remove the policy.

[ Tracking Progress and Success / Failure ]

To view detailed job view for tracking progress and success/failure.

Once backup has completed, you able to view the number of recovery point listed.

That’s all about our walkthrough. We are currently wondering if the back end system is running “Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager”.

My Visitor Came From...

About Me

Lai, (MVP for Cloud and Datacenter Management) has more than 16 years of IT industry experience. He specializes in Hyper-V, System Center and Microsoft Azure products. Lai has actively presents Microsoft Virtualization Day, Microsoft Cloud Day, Microsoft Tech-Ed New Zealand (2011), Microsoft Techday 2011(Singapore) and local community. He actively blogs on Virtualization and System Center at
http://www.ms4u.info and is the founder of Malaysia Virtualization User Group (MVUG).
Please feel free to leave a comment or email to ms4u@outlook.com.